That great annual harbinger of spring, that mid-Lent quasi-Catholic dual name-day celebration for two saints (at least one of whom probably existed), that diphthong of drinking excuses, the elision of St. Urho’s Day and St. Patrick’s Day is again upon us — and on a weekend, no less!
Now, it’s well known that Irish Americans can be very loud and unsubtle about celebrating their (our) heritage of leprechauns and bullshit artists and crooked politicians from South Boston and great singers like Ella Fitzgerald. And so of course everybody in America and around the world knows that tomorrow is Evacuation Day, I mean St. Patrick’s day, in honor of the great Romano-British Christian missionary who returned to the land of his captivity and bondage as an apostle of peace and went on to drive the serpents into the sea, (or maybe not), and so Guinness will be consumed, and cabbage, and yea, Harp Lager too, begorrah.
Alas throughout much of this country that is not the upper Midwest, the name day of St. Urhu, who drove the grasshoppers from Finland (today, March 16) is sadly neglected, to the point that we can expect virtually no mention of it by color commentators in television broadcasts of today’s NCAA basketball games. But let it never be said that Wetmachine has forgotten the confabulated patron saint of the Finno-American diaspora (of which I am a proud member), the great St. Urhu, whose famous utterance Heinäsirkka, heinäsirkka, mene täältä hiiteen (grasshopper, grasshopper, buzz off why dontcha?) still stirs our hearts everywhere.
That saintly collusus!
It’s OK to mark this day without alcohol, but consumption of traditional all-starch foodstuffs is encouraged. So if you can find some Karjalanpiirakka, go for it.
Acts of the Apostles
My Thoughts Exactly
The “Meme Hustler” hustler: Evgeny Morozov’s Stupid Talk about Tim O’Reilly
[note: I wrote the following post one Sunday afternoon nearly two months ago. It was no great shakes, but I was happy to have finally written something to break out of my Wetmachine doldrums. I set it aside to jell overnight, intending to re-read, put in links, give it a once-over the next day before posting it. However on that next day, Monday , the bombing attack at the Boston Marathon occurred, and publishing this little essay was clearly inappropriate. Time has passed & I've finally gotten around to re-reading and putting in the links. It's no longer as timely as it was, but in any event, here it is. . .]
Evgeny Morozov is a guy with a soapbox and a schtick.
His soapbox is his position as a “go to” authority on technoskepticism — that is, he makes his living pointing out, to any who care to listen, The Folly of Technological Solutionism (which phrase I italicize because it’s also the subtitle of his latest book, whose primary title is To Save Everything, Click Here).
His schtick is finding influential people who embrace (or appear to embrace) this philosophy of technological solutionism and taking them down a peg or two. And he’s really good at peg-decrementing — which probably accounts for the prominence of his soapbox, which includes positions at prestigious academic institutions (Stanford, Georgetown) and think tanks, and regular appearances in prominent publications (New York Times, Foreign Affairs) and a TED fellowship.
Consider, for example, Morozov’s hilarious (and quite well-deserved, in my opinion) evisceration of former San Francisco mayor, and current Lieutenant Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, in a Bookforum review of Newsom’s book Citizenville:
The essay gets only more brutal from there. I loved it when I read it; I actually exclaimed “YES!” out loud a few times, which seemed to startle my fellow passengers on the New Jersey Transit train from Penn Station to Chatham, New Jersey. When he’s on target, Morozov can be brilliant, funny, and merciless.
Recently Morozov turned his attention on Tim O’Reilly, the founder of O’Reilly Media (formerly O’Reilly & Associates), the so-called visionary whose careers first as a publisher of books on computer technology and then as impresario of various conferences that bear his name catapulted him to international prominence as a commentator on where technology is, or might be, taking us as a nation and even as a species.
To put it mildly, Morozov doesn’t care much for O’Reilly. In fact he seems to reserve for O’Reilly a disdain much more intense than that which he evinced for the poseur airhead Gavin Newsom. In a recent piece in the smugly iconoclastic magazine The Baffler, (“The Meme Hustler — Tim O’Reilly’s Crazy Talk”) Morozov goes after O’Reilly like an angry Rottweiler. Or more accurately, he goes after a caricature of O’Reilly like a caricature of an angry Rottweiler. I really enjoyed Morozov’s take-down of Newsom, and O’Reilly (“Saint Tim”) is, frankly, an object of veneration in some circles who could stand a little ribbing. I’m a Walt Whitman kind of guy in that I don’t have much tolerance for the veneration of popes, Dalai Lamas or Steve Jobses; Whitman enjoined us to “tip your cap to no man”, and I’m down with that. So I wouldn’t mind seeing St. Tim taken down a notch or two, just on general principles. I had done a 30-second skim read of Morozov’s essay when it first appeared in The Baffler and it looked promising, so I was looking forward to actually reading The Meme Hustler when I found the time to do so. I found the time yesterday.
Man, what a disappointment. What a pompous, shallow, unfair, error-filled and hysterical piece of dreck. Essentially, I found The Meme Hustler stupid and baffling. It made me angry. I explain why below the fold.
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